Amanda Knox Opens Up About Her Life & Career After Wrongful Conviction

SEATTLE, WA — Amanda Knox has revealed new details about her prison ordeal, her new life and career in journalism, and how she says she was coerced into confessing to a brutal murder and wound up sentenced to 26 years in an Italian jail in a new interview with Rolling Stone.

In 2009, Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were both convicted of the sexual assault and murder of Knox’s roommate Meredith Kutcher in Perugia, Italy. She was sentenced to 26 years in prison – and he to 25 – but both convictions were overturned in 2011.

The prosecution appealed, and in 2013 they were retried for the same murder and found guilty again. That verdict was overturned after another appeal, and the two were eventually acquitted in 2015.

Acquaintance Rudy Guede was convicted of the crime and is currently serving a 16-year prison sentence, but the Italian government and international media reported on every salacious detail of Kutcher’s murder and attacked Knox, who the British press nicknamed “Foxy Knoxy.”

After her exoneration, Knox wrote the memoir Waiting to Be Heard. Today, she works as a reporter for the West Seattle Herald.

Knox lives in Seattle with her boyfriend, Christopher Robinson, who she has been dating since 2015. In addition to her journalism, she also works with The Innocence Project,and said her work with the nonprofit organization has helped her cope with the psychological trauma she felt since her conviction.

Knox said she thought the documentary O.J.: Made in America was “incredible” in its portrayal of the Black community and their very real fears and suspicions of the LAPD.

When asked if she saw similarities between her trial and Simpson’s, Knox said:

“They saw themselves in O.J. Simpson, so they wanted him to be free. But in my case, who was I? No one knew who I was before all of this happened. If people see what they want to see, they wanted to see the Black man in the L.A. community accused of something by the cops who were corrupt be innocent. In my case, so many people thought, ‘Oh, this random college girl? Ohhh, Girls Gone Wild. Ohhh, that’s hot. Ohhh, I want to see that.’ That’s what they wanted to see and that’s what they saw.”

She said that her ordeal has made her “part of a tribe of people I would have never been mixed in with otherwise,” including “mostly impoverished Black men who are unable to defend themselves.”

Knox is currently waiting to hear the status of her lawsuit against Italy related to her alleged illegal interrogation, which she claims lasted 53 hours over a period of five days. The case is currently being heard in the European Court of Human Rights. About her interrogation, Knox stated:

“You don’t have to beat a person into submission and psychologically screw with them, like they did with me. As soon as they start pushing an interrogation into a predetermined answer, as opposed to the truth, the outcome is inevitable. You are going to break people. I was a 20-year-old girl who had never been in trouble with the law before, and I had the Italian fluency of a 10-year-old. There was no way I was coming out of the interrogation room intact.“

Asked if she had any regrets, Knox was thoughtful and said that she wished that she had been able to write a novel in prison, but other than that, is trying her best and says she is “very happy with the person I am now.”

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